Books
Of The Times Date: May 28, 1989,
Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 21,
Column 1; Book Review Desk Byline: Lead: HITLER'S GOOD
RIGHT ARM Göring.
A Biography.
By David Irving. Illustrated. 573 pp. New York:
William Morrow & Company. $22.95.
Text: By PETER HOFFMANN Peter Hoffmann's most recent book is
"German Resistance to Hitler."DAVID IRVING's detailed and
richly documented biography of Hermann
Göring is one in a series of deliberately
controversial works by one of the most successful
researchers on Nazi Germany. Göring was born
in Bavaria in 1893, the son of the governor of
German South-West Africa (Namibia). He grew up in a
castle near Nuremberg and in a suburb of Berlin,
was educated in the elite officer cadet schools at
Karlsruhe and Berlin-Lichterfelde, became a highly
decorated fighter pilot in World War I and at its
end was for a short time commander of the
Richthofen wing. After 1918 he worked in Danish and Swedish
aviation enterprises, and he had a long affair with
a Swedish countess, whom he married after her
divorce. In 1922 he joined Hitler's Nazi Party and
became leader of the SA (storm troopers). He took
part in Hitler's abortive 1923 Putsch and
fled to Austria, then to Italy and Sweden. In 1928
he returned to Germany and was elected a Nazi
Reichstag deputy. In 1932, as chairman of the
strongest faction, he became Speaker of the
Reichstag. With Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor in
1933, Göring became Prussian Minister of the
Interior, with full authority over the regular and
secret state police forces; he was thus a key
figure in the usurpation-and-consolidation phase of
Hitler's dictatorship. By April 1933 he was also
Prussian Minister-President, the founder of
concentration camps and Air Transport Minister. In
July he added the post of Reich Minister of
Forestry; in 1934 he was named Hitler's successor
as Fuhrer, Chancellor and President of Germany; in
1935 he became Commander in Chief of the air force,
in 1936 Plenipotentiary General for the Four-Year
Plan, in 1938 a field marshal and in 1940 Reich
Marshal, the highest-ranking military officer in
the world. Göring's air force had spectacular
successes in Belgium, the Netherlands and France at
the beginning of World War II, but in the long term
it proved to be mismanaged and outclassed by the
British and American forces. Göring's
Government enterprises in the economic sphere were
partial successes at best, while his private
fortune flourished through bribery and shameless
grabbing on a huge scale. Bursts of energy
alternated in Göring's life with long bouts of
lethargy and dereliction of duty. He preferred
generally to devote his time to the unimpeded
enjoyment of luxurious living on an Oriental scale,
to the quasi-legal and illegal acquisition of a
gigantic collection of art objects, to the stag
hunt in East Prussia, and to donning fantastic
white uniforms and huge jeweled rings, all topped
off with elaborate makeup. In the interest of
protecting his life style, and in aid of Hitler's
designs on Eastern Europe, Göring made some
efforts to prevent and later to contain the
war. War, according to Mr. Irving, bored Göring,
except insofar as it offered him money and
treasures or new offices and titles. But he had no
qualms about committing murder on any scale, as
when he managed the mass executions of SA leaders
and other former or present enemies in 1934; he
headed the Four-Year Plan for the explicit
preparation of both the military war and the war
against the Jews. Göring later boasted of his
murder management against the SA, but denied
knowledge of the mass murder of Jews. But he had
participated in a conference with Hitler on July
16, 1941, on large-scale extermination measures,
and the terms of his own order to the SS General
Reinhard Heydrich on July 31, 1941, were clear
enough: to make preparations for the "final
solution" of the Jewish question in all parts of
Europe under German influence. Göring was
tried, convicted and sentenced to hang in
Nuremberg, but he bribed a guard and managed to
beat the hangman by biting a cyanide capsule on
Oct. 15, 1946. Mr. Irving's constant references to archives,
diaries and letters, and the overwhelming amount of
detail in his work, suggest objectivity. In fact
they put up a screen behind which a very different
agenda is transacted. It begins with the suggestion
that Göring's less than wholesome character
traits, his conviction "that money could buy
everything, and a contempt for morality" may have
been imprinted on the young Göring by Dr.
Hermann von Epenstein, whom Mr. Irving calls
"Jewish" and whom he calls the boy's "godfather,"
although only Christians could act as godfathers.
Since Mr. Irving does not consider the point, he
appears to subscribe to the definitions of the
Nazis' racial laws of 1935. The same sort of twist
is employed again and again, particularly for the
war period. Mr. Irving is a great obfuscator and he ignores
the true chain of decision-making. In his account
of the Battle of Britain, Göring was prevented
by Hitler's restrictions from "unfolding his real
air power against the enemy [ Britain ] .
It was a strategic error." But then he accuses
Churchill of having been the first in the war to
order the bombing of civilian populations. He says
that only then did Hitler order retaliation, upon
which the German air force did all it was capable
of in attacks on London. In fact, both Britain and
Germany committed themselves at the beginning of
the war to avoid attacks on civilian populations.
After German planes bombed open towns in Poland
after Sept. 12, 1939, and, on Göring's order,
carried out the "saturation bombardment" of Warsaw
on Sept. 24 and 25, 1939, it was mainly French
fears of bombardment of their cities that prevented
a departure by Britain from her earlier commitment.
Only after the German bombing of Rotterdam on May
14, 1940, did the British authorize attacks on
certain targets in the Ruhr industrial district -
but intentionally bombing civilian populations
remained outlawed. In August 1940, Hitler still
forbade attacks on population centers, but attacks
on British air force ground support stations, even
in London, were permitted and carried out on Aug.
24, 1940, whereupon the British responded with a
raid on Berlin the next day. Distortions affect every important aspect of
this book to the point of obfuscation. Mr. Irving
seeks to show that Göring frequently was not
consulted before key decisions were made; on one
page he says Hitler made them all, but on another
he says Göring was consulted on every
important decision - as Göring himself
maintained during his trial. Mr. Irving's numerous references to the
persecution of the Jews acknowledge its central
role in the Hitler era. But he describes Hitler and
Göring as only dimly aware of rumored
"atrocities." Göring, he says, "naively"
signed an order drafted by Heydrich on July 31,
1941, to prepare the "final solution" of the Jewish
question. In this context, although there is no
apparent connection with Göring, Mr. Irving
reproduces
a note by the second-ranking civil servant in
the German Justice Ministry, Franz
Schlegelberger. The note says that the head of
the Reich Chancellery had told Schlegelberger that
the Fuhrer had "repeatedly" declared that he wanted
"the solution of the Jewish question postponed
until after the war." Mr. Irving knows that this is part of a file
regarding the legal status and definition of German
Jews of mixed parentage and those married to
non-Jewish partners. He also knows that the terms
"solution" and "final solution" alternate in the
file and distinguish between administrative
measures affecting German Jews on one hand, and the
comprehensive "final solution" for all Jews under
German control. Apparently, 11 years after the West
German historian Eberhard
Jackel first showed and explained the document
to him, Mr. Irving is still too pleased with its
possibilities to see that it defeats his purpose.
By publishing it as "proof" that Hitler did not
want the Jews murdered, Mr. Irving accepts the term
"solution of the Jewish question" as meaning mass
murder, and he accepts Hitler's knowledge of the
program. Had he taken it at its discernible face
value, he would have avoided the logical trap.
Further, he put himself in the position of
accepting secondhand evidence on Hitler's wishes in
the matter, so that he cannot convincingly contrive
to exclude the mass of available secondhand
evidence contradicting his interpretation. In his earlier book, "Hitler's
War," Mr. Irving usefully provoked historians
by raising the question of the smoking gun: whether
an order could be found from Hitler to perpetrate a
holocaust against the Jews. Now, after the
publication of the meticulous investigations
of
Gerald Fleming, Eberhard
Jackel, Helmut Krausnick and Alfred
Streim, it is no longer possible to regard Mr.
Irving's thesis as a useful provocation. The merit of this Göring biography lies in
its mass of biographical detail and in numerous
(though not complete) source references. But larger
issues are not made more comprehensible.
Göring's authority inexplicably waxes and
wanes in Mr. Irving's staccato narrative (which is
often cheapened by a demotic idiom); praiseworthy
initiatives alternate with gigantic black-market
and blackmail operations. Mr. Irving takes care to
denounce Göring's "scandalous" and "unsavory"
behavior, but at the same time he tries to make him
appear as a spoiled child, a psychopath who calms
his nerves by playing with a potful of diamonds,
and a "Renaissance man" with an insatiable appetite
for the finer things in life. It is unfortunate
that Mr. Irving wastes his extraordinary talents as
a researcher and writer on trivializing the
greatest crimes in German history, on manipulating
historical sources and on highlighting the
theatrics of the Nazi era. Copyright
1999 The New York Times Company |
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